Father and Son (25 page)

He dropped the magazine in the chair and looked around. The Redbone puppy was lying under the porch watching him. He walked toward the house. The puppy came out wagging its tail but he paid no mind to it. When it came up and tried to lick his hand he just kicked casually at it and told it to get away. It seemed puzzled, standing there watching him go up the steps and over to the screen door.

He pulled it open and stuck his head inside.

“Hey. Daddy. You here?”

A house full of silence answered him. He stepped inside and took a few steps down the hall.

“Hey. Old man. You asleep?”

The bed in the front room was empty, the sheets rumpled and swept halfway to the floor. The television dead and black. There was no telling where he was. Probably over there fucking that old woman again. It looked like he would have had enough by now. All those nights he'd stayed gone. What had they done about Bobby? Had they met somewhere? Had they done it in a car or a motel or out in the woods? All the arguments and the screaming when he came home, all his mother's tears. Sad times and the weight of them still pulled at him. And now Bobby carrying on with Jewel. Somebody was going to pay for that. Nothing but a bunch of sorry son of a bitches around him his whole life.

He walked on down the hall, calling out a few more times. By the time he got to the kitchen he knew there was nobody home. The empty cups they'd used were still in the sink, the coffeepot sitting where he had left it on the dead stove eye. But now there was a pint bottle of whiskey on the kitchen table. He picked it up and opened the screen door. Some chickens were walking around on the back porch. He stepped out there, watchful where he put his feet. He shooed and kicked at the chickens and they fluttered squawking. The old cars baked under the sun in the yard. Some of them had been sitting there for as long as he could remember, junkers hauled in and never hauled out, cannibalized for parts, rusting lower and lower into the ground each year, his mother's beggings to his father to remove them falling on deaf ears.

He sat down in a chair and took the cap off the whiskey and turned the bottle up. It burned going down and his eyes watered a little. He put the cap on the arm of the chair and studied the faded hulks before him.

“Why don't you clean this damn place up?” he asked softly. He shook
his head and took another drink. After a while he got up and put the cap back on the whiskey and stuck it in his back pocket and began moving through the house, looking for money.

The first place he tried was Virgil's bedroom. He was loath to go in there, more so after he saw his mother's clothes hanging in the closet. Standing there in front of the opened double doors he touched a white dress with small blue spots, a matching belt that hung in braided loops at the waist. He could see her walking in it, her purse in her hand. He rubbed the material between his fingers, felt the smoothness of it slide on his fingertips. He let it drop. Her shoes were there on the closet floor in a pile. Her one good coat stuffed in between the dresses. Why did his father keep all this stuff? He guessed he had loved her at one time. He didn't know when things had gone so wrong between them. Things had gotten jumbled together in his mind. Times and events. After she'd gotten sick he'd thought of trying to escape, but it always seemed so hopeless to him, standing at the back of a truck loading or unloading with other prisoners and looking off into the distance at the fields burning under the hot air, the thousands of acres of Delta land that stretched away to the far tree lines and somewhere out there ending in twelve-foot razor wire. The guards rode horses and carried shotguns for those who would run. Nights locked into the camps and everything outside alight with the beams from the fence and the invisible guards with their bolt-action deer rifles. He never had tried them, never formed a plan. Three years sometimes didn't seem that long. Sometimes it seemed an eternity. He had missed her cooking. And missed it now this moment he stood looking at her clothes.

He turned away from the closet and looked at the things in the room. A dressing table like Jewel's, small white bottles and jars still sitting there. A hand mirror facedown on an embroidered doily. Walking closer he saw envelopes addressed to his mother in his own hand. He pulled back the
chair and sat down at the table and picked one from the pile, turned it over in his hand, looked at the postmark. It had been written nearly two years before. With something like dread he opened the flap and pulled out the thin folded pages. That time came back to him as he read the first lines. He was saying how much he wanted to be home and how hot it was and he could remember being on his bunk with his pillow turned sideways and propped against the angle iron that formed the headboard, a tablet on one raised knee and radios playing, the babble of voices around him and the blue pants with the white stripe down the side of each leg. Sock-footed and the overhead light smoky and dim and home seeming so far away. It all came back to him, how it smelled down there, how it sounded at night with that constant talking and shouting and radio music and how he could write a letter to his mother and make it go away for small bits of time. In the letter he never mentioned his father or Jewel. He talked about working in the fields, told her he was sorry for what he'd done, that when he got out he was going to do better. Things he wrote to make her feel better, things he knew she wanted to hear. Little lies that maybe buoyed her heart up some. In those spaces of time when he wrote the letters he felt that he was somehow with her, somehow sharing her presence across the distance that separated them from each other.

After a while he stopped seeing the words he had so painfully scrawled on the cheap pulp paper and folded the letter back up, stuck it inside the envelope, and put it where it had been.

He went through the drawers in Virgil's dresser quickly, flipping through socks and underwear, a meager assortment of near-threadbare things. Not much of a place to hide anything to begin with. There were no sheaves of money in there. He turned away from the dresser and looked at the room again, saw a cardboard box of old magazines, the bed, a tall wastebasket that held umbrellas and canes. He went to the bed
and lifted the mattress from one side, ran his hand under it and looked, repeated the search from the other side. Nothing. He was reluctant to go through his mother's things, but he did. The pockets of her dresses, the drawers of her dresser, becoming more irritated and feeling more desperate at what he was doing. He felt in the pockets of her coat. Got down on his knees and looked into the toes of her shoes for bills wadded and crammed. He searched every possible hiding place in the closet and it yielded him nothing except a bite on the end of one finger from a large brown spider that was up in the toe of one shoe.

“Son of a
bitch
!” he said, then shook the spider out and smashed it with the shoe.

He looked at the room again. A small bedside table was filled with pictures that he rummaged through, pausing to look at them, Virgil and fish, his mother in a blue dress, Theron on a horse, Puppy on a bicycle, infants sprawled on blankets. There were younger versions of his parents sitting on the hood of a shiny car holding hands. There was no money in those images of times gone by. He shut the drawer and stood up, almost in a panic. He walked quickly from the room and went into the kitchen and started going through the cabinets. Behind the third door he tried he found a white teapot with a lid and he pulled it from its resting place and removed the top. U.S. currency was hiding in there, folded crisp twenty-dollar bills packed in a wad.

“All right,” he said quietly, then set the teapot on the table and went to the front door and looked out. The road was deserted. Virgil wasn't walking into the yard. The puppy was lying on the porch. It lifted its head at his step and began to get up wearily to greet him but he turned away and hurried back to the kitchen. The whiskey was still in his pocket and he pulled it out and sat down in the chair and got another drink of it. He was hurrying now, anxious to be away and done with it. Out of here and no trace of his coming and going left for the old man to find. And
maybe he didn't even know how much was in there. He reached in and pulled the wad out and straightened the bills and counted them, sliding them quickly through his fingers and flattening each bill on the table. There was six hundred and forty dollars in the little teapot and he kept a hundred and put the rest back, took another drink of the whiskey and left it on the table where it had been. Then he was up the hall and out the door and into the car, going down the road glancing up at the rearview mirror until he could get to the turnoff and the woods that would hide him. Once he got there he relaxed, lit a cigarette, feeling the weight of the money in his pocket not as a tangible thing like ounces or pounds but with a steady reassurance that the day was looking a lot better.

He turned up the radio and drove leisurely, riding in and out of the sunshine where the machines were busy mauling the forest and where trucks stood waiting to be loaded by knucklebooms that lifted handfuls of logs in their giant claws and dropped them splintering each other into the waiting uprights of the trucks that swayed and shook with the weight. There might be a job and probably a bad one, running a chain saw all day long dropping trees. But he had money in his pocket now. He wasn't going to worry about a job for a while.

He drove on past the loading sites and turned down a sand road about a mile past there. He was in the national forest once he drove past a brown sign made of wood and yellow letters proclaiming it so. The hand of man had not touched these woods. None of it was posted or could be. He and Jewel had parked in this refuge a lot of times early on and he drove down through the sandy lane, a little breeze blowing through the trees that lined the road, by giant leaning pines that were the last of their kind, limbless for sixty or seventy feet and then bushed heavily with branches and cones. Hollows of old hardwoods where the sunlight broke into shafts of white intensity and the floor of the forest was clean of
scrub stuff and smooth with its carpet of dead leaves, eighty and ninety years of them lying packed and dense upon the ground so that you could see a deer moving a quarter mile away between the gray trunks if your eyes were good. A curve in the road where there were minerals in the ground and the deer had pawed and licked out a hollow two feet deep and sometimes when you rounded that curve at night you might see ten or a dozen of them grouped there, bucks, does, fawns. He drove by a little creek that fed into a lake of forty acres. They had parked there, too, summer nights on the backseat with the radio playing and the car pointed toward the road so that if anybody came up he could turn on the headlights and blind the driver until they could get their clothes on, but nobody ever came up. How many times with the stars bright above as he caressed her body on a quilt in the woods with the moon showing through the limbs overhead? Uncounted the times she had moved over him and swung her heavy breasts to an unheard rhythm that she carried in her head and her womb. Long nights of lovemaking with her dark hair in a tangle and the tiny freckles on her shoulders visible in the pale light that shone down on them from above. He eyed the woods he drove through and almost wished it could be that way again. Wondered how long it had been going on between them, what they'd done, if they did it in her bed, if they took his son on picnics, and if he knew who his father was.

He wished now that he'd brought the whiskey with him. He could have sipped it, driving this lane of timber, his lane of memories, listening to the radio. There seemed to be no answers. She'd always talked about love but she didn't know what she was talking about. She didn't know what kind of trouble love could get you in. It could ruin everything and turn into hate. He didn't want love. He only wanted things to be easier somehow, for his life to not be so wrong. It had been a long time since it hadn't been that way and he didn't think it had just started
with Theron. Something had always been wrong at his house, way back when he didn't understand what his father drank that made him fall in the house or the yard and cry the way he did, say the strange things he said. Why they fought and why his mother wept alone in her bed at night. So many things he didn't understand back then, the long absences of his father, the cars towed into the yard burned or smashed beyond repair, the bandages he wore on his face sometimes and the whiskey always sitting on the kitchen table as it had been today. Once in a while in a rational moment he would ask himself why he drank after he'd seen what it did to his father, to his whole family. But there was no answer for that either.

The woods were lush and deep green and the limbs were alive with birds. A banded woodpecker rapped hard and staccato on a standing dead tree near the road and then flew, a bright dart weaving through the leaves. He drove slowly, guiding the car around the curves and over the hills, cool winds wafting through the opened windows of the car. At a three-way intersection he slowed and downshifted and turned right, then gaining speed, moving it up into third, his arm resting on the sill of the window. After a few more miles he came to a stop sign and halted at the edge of the highway. He waited on one car and then a dump truck topped the hill behind it and he had to wait on it too. But he wasn't in any hurry now. It came by dropping gravel that bounced in the road. He swung out behind it and trailed it for a few miles, until it turned off. He kept going, driving south now, the tires slapping at the highway. It was hot again now that he was out of the woods. When the news came on he knew it was noon. He kept driving, looking for the sign. Maybe it wasn't even there anymore. In three years things could change. Some things could. On a long straightaway a car came up behind him rapidly and shot around, cutting back in close. He held up his middle finger but the car went on up the road very fast. Then he saw the old sign. He put his
blinker on and slowed, turned to the right with a lazy spin of the steering wheel. The road was rough with patched asphalt and potholes and the worn shocks on the car didn't do much for the ride. He drove up the hill and put on his blinker again even though there was nobody behind him. It was a dirt road he turned into, washboarded and rutted and grass standing up in places. It looked as if it hadn't been used for a long time. The road got narrower and rougher and there was a half-filled mud hole he had to ease through carefully, the bottom of the car dragging until he goosed it and splashed on through.